This article is more than 1 year old

Qualcomm piqs 'Centriq' as specifiq honorifiq for slicq ARM server chip

And shifts its data center processor wing into its own Inq, er, Inc

Qualcomm will today announce it has picked the name Centriq for its forthcoming family of 64-bit ARMv8-compatible server processors.

The chip designer, headquartered in San Diego, California, applied for "Centriq" and "Qualcomm Centriq" as US trademarks on July 27 this year. In its application paperwork, Qualcomm said it will use the marks for "microprocessors for server functionality" and "chipsets and computer software for server functionality." As far as we can tell, no logo has been filed, yet.

The system-on-chips were first teased in October last year. Since then, Qualcomm has produced 24-core samples, fabricated using FinFET gates, for potential customers to try out. These customers include hyper-scale cloud providers in North America and China.

We should see more of the chips by the final quarter of 2016. "Our first generation of Qualcomm Centriq processors are on track to sample production silicon before the end of this year," Qualcomm told us on Wednesday. In late January this year, the biz told investors the chips will officially ship within the next 12 months or so. In the background of this, Qualcomm's joint venture with China's Guizhou Province is also developing its own ARMv8 server CPUs.

The Centriq family is not based on the Snapdragon SoCs Qualcomm designs for phones and tablets: the processors instead have their own cores designed for cloud, platform-as-a-service and other data center workloads.

Meanwhile, the Centriq team has been moved into its own organization – Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies Inc – which is a subsidiary of Qualcomm. This business will "aggressively pursue opportunities in the data center industry," its parent company said.

Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies Inc will be headed by Anand Chandrasekher, a senior veep at Qualcomm.

Rolling the data center processor engineers into a separate subsidiary distances them and their work from Qualcomm's mobile chipsets and technologies, which are subject to various complex licensing deals and regulations. By being kept apart from all that, Qualcomm Datacenter Technologies will hit fewer legal hurdles in, for instance, releasing open-source code. ®

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